522 FALLACIES. 



The day on which any calamity happened has been considered an unfor- 

 tunate day, and there has been a feeling everywhere, and in some nations 

 a religious obligation, against transacting any important business on that 

 (lay. For on such a day our thoughts are likely to be of misfortune. For 

 a similar reason, any untoward occurrence in commencing an undertaking 

 lias been considered ominous of failure ; and often, doubtless, has really 

 contributed to it by putting the persons engaged in the enterprise more or 

 less out of spirits ; but the belief has equally prevailed where the disagree- 

 able circumstance was, independently of superstition, too insignificant to 

 depress the spirits by any influence of its own. All know the story of 

 Cajsar's accidentally stumbling in the act of landing on the African coast; 

 and the presence of mind with which he converted the direful presage into 

 a favorable one by exclaiming, "Africa, I embrace thee." Such omens, it 

 is true, were often conceived as wai'nings of the future, given by a friendly 

 or a hostile deity ; but this very superstition grew out of a pre-existing 

 tendency ; the god was supposed to send, as an indication of what was to 

 come, something which people were already disposed to consider in that 

 light. So in the case of lucky or unlucky names. Herodotus tells us how 

 the Greeks, on the way to Mycale, were encouraged in their enterprise by 

 the arrival of a deputation from Samos, one of the members of which was 

 named Hegesistratus, the leader of armies. 



Cases may be pointed out in which something which could have no real 

 effect but to make persons think of misfortune, was regarded not merely 

 as a prognostic, but as something approaching to an actual cause of it. 

 The £u0J7yLt£i of the Greeks, and favete Unguis, or bona verba quceso, of the 

 Romans, evince the care with which they endeavored to repress the utter- 

 ance of any Avord expressive or suggestive of ill fortune ; not from notions 

 of delicate politeness, to which their general mode of conduct and feeling 

 had very little reference, but from bona fide alarm lest the event so sug- 

 gested to the imagination should in fact occur. Some vestige of a similar 

 superstition has been known to exist among uneducated persons even in 

 our own day : it is thought an unchristian thing to talk of, or suppose, the 

 death of any person while he is alive. It is known how careful the Ro- 

 mans were to avoid, by an indirect mode of speech, the utterance of any 

 word dii'ectly expressive of death or other calamity ; how instead of tnor- 

 tuus est they said vixit; and "be the event fortunate or othericise'''' instead 

 of adverse. The name Maleventum, of which Salmasius so sagaciously de- 

 tected the Thessalian origin (MaXofte, MaXotVroc), they changed into the 

 highly propitious denomination, Beneventum ; Egesta into Segesta; and 

 Epidamnus, a name so interesting in its associations to the reader of Thu- 

 cydides, they exchanged for Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word 

 suggestive of damnum or detriment. 



"If a hare cross the highway," says Sir Thomas Browne,* "there are 

 few above threescore that are not perplexed thereat; which notwithstand- 

 ing is but an augurial terror, according to that received expression, Inau- 

 spicatum dat iter oblatus lepus. And the ground of the conceit was prob- 

 ably no greater than this, that a fearful animal passing by us portended 

 unto us something to be feared ; as upon the like consideration the meet- 

 ing of a fox presaged some future imposture." Such superstitions as these 

 last must be the result of study ; they are too recondite for natural or spon- 

 taneous growth. But when the attempt was once made to construct a 



* Vulgar Errors, book v., chap. 21. 



